Cyber Security Alert- Russian hackers selling passwords and email addresses for just £2

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Hackers from Russia are nowadays selling extremely sensitive data including passwords and email addresses of some of the country’s most powerful officials. This includes high profile politicians from the UK, US, Canada, Germany, and France.

And as per the sources of the Cybersecurity Insiders, the data was realized from a large number of reliable resources like LinkedIn, MySpace and other smaller career based networking websites. In total, Russian hackers are believed to be holding data of more than one billion records.

The reason to sell the said data for a low price of just 2 pounds is the fact that it has been around for months on the web and some of it has been sold on a recurrent note.

According to the news resource ‘The Times’, passwords and email IDs of British cabinet ministers, ambassadors, and senior police officers is much on demand. This includes the sensitive credentials of Justine Greening and Greg Clark holding Education secretary and business secretary posts in UK’s parliament. The UK based resource added that log-in details of more than 1K British MPs along with their parliamentary staff, data of more tan 7K employees of the police force and 1000 foreign office officials are being sold for a high price by the Russian hackers on dark web.

The British Intelligence and security agency called the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has confirmed the post published in ‘The Times’.

And GCHQ also disclosed that the data of some high profile officials holding prominent posts in Military, Defense, IT, Finance and Political sectors of developed countries like US, France, Germany, and Canada are available to the hackers.

Currently, The National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) is probing for the facts and the resource through which the hackers could have gained access to the sensitive data.

However, for obvious reasons, NCSC doesn’t want to disclose the probe details on a further note. But it has warned all officials to hold government offices to take precautionary steps as there is a high probability that these hackers will use the data to blackmail or impersonate officials on the web via their personal accounts.

So, NCSC is planning to reissue fresh guidelines to government departments after it was alerted by the article of ‘The Times’.

Note-According to UK’s web resource Daily Mail, the three most used passwords to access most email IDs from the UK’s police department are password, police, and police1.

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Naveen Goud is a writer at Cybersecurity Insiders covering topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Startups, Cyber Attacks, Cloud Security and Mobile Security

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